NEW YORK — Hollywood's favorite historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, says she may know presidents, but she's no casting director.

After the critical and commercial success of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's hit 2012 film based on Goodwin's 2005 best seller, Team of Rivals, she signed another movie deal last week.

Spielberg's studio, Dreamworks, bought the rights to Goodwin's new book,The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (Simon & Schuster, out Tuesday).

During a visit to New York, Goodwin is asked who should star as Roosevelt.

Goodwin laughs and says, "Truly, I leave that to those people who know that world better than me."

But if she doesn't know the actor, she adds, "I know what that person should be like: Extraordinary energy. A voice that goes from bass to falsetto. Lots of gestures. Lots of action in his words. And most important, someone who 'almost dances with the joy of life,' as someone said of Teddy Roosevelt."

With prompting, she mentions one name: Daniel Day-Lewis, who won an Oscar for his lead role in Lincoln. "I can't imagine a better Lincoln," she says.

When she first saw the movie, "I felt like I was watching this man that I had lived with for 10 years" (in the sense historians have of living with their subjects).

"Walking! Talking! Gesturing. It was him!"

She adds that if Day-Lewis could be "squished down a few inches to 5-(foot)-10, and if he could gain about 40 or 50 pounds … I can't imagine he couldn't be Teddy Roosevelt if he wanted to be."

Dreamworks hasn't named a cast or set a release date.

After seven years of research, what one question would Goodwin pose to Roosevelt, who died in 1919 at 60?

"How did you come up with all your energy? Was it natural-born? Did you really drink 40 cups of coffee a day, as some say? I know he gave Maxwell House its slogan, 'Good to the last drop.' I'd love to capture just one-tenth of that man's energy."

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is releasing a book on Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the golden age of journalism, 'The Bully Pulpit.'(Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY)